When a high profile person disappears into St. Petersburg and a huge mercenary group hands over its weapons, what’s happening? Don’t hold your breath waiting to find out. In a positively demure twist to a murky tale, the Wagner Group has effectively vanished. They’ve handed over their weapons and disappeared.
Prigozhin was pretty verbose. He can pick up a phone and get coverage anywhere on Earth. Now he’s totally silent. The Wagner Group was Russia’s leading frontline unit in Ukraine for months. Now it’s effectively non-combatant. There has to be more to it than this.
Never mind the conspiracies. The physical reality is that Russia’s one and only effective force has now vanished. According to Belarus, Wagner troops “have not visited” their barracks in Belarus. Prigozhin is supposedly in St. Petersburg, a long way from Belarus. Some say he’s dead, but that’s not confirmed.
This is demure to the point of impossibility. It’s urbane to the point of absurdity. If Russia had said Prigozhin and Wagner had entered a monastery, it would be far more plausible. In the whole of Russian political history, the sole consistent factor is that nothing is ever simple. This is far too simple.
Prigozhin was Putin’s left-hand man. He was the guy who did the stuff nobody knew about. He was backup as required. Now he’s gone. How simple can that be? The exact relationship between the two was understandably vague.
Either a major player has been removed, or the game has new players. It’s a big move. Russia’s position in Ukraine isn’t exactly rosy. Now is obviously not the time to reduce combat capability. …So why do this?
Is the idea to get Wagner out of harm’s way if the Ukrainians break through? Is it to have Wagner back in Russia and out of sight? To reboot or reconfigure Wagner into an internal safeguard for Putin? Or is it simply to remove a threat and be very noisy about it for local consumption?
There are so many unanswered questions and way too many “theatrical” elements in this equation. Maybe Prigozhin was being honest about the actual situation. That’s not impossible, just very out of character for anyone in Russian politics. Maybe Wagner was getting too credible, and the “mutiny” hit too many raw nerves in Moscow.
On the other hand, Russia is very much on the defensive. Maybe they feel secure or insecure enough to do some ironing out of the bumpier personalities. It’s easier to do policy if nobody’s around to object. Maybe Russia’s Ministry of Defense is more effective off the battlefield than on it.
The truth is an unambiguous reality. This is all much too ambiguous to be true.
